My son’s latest addiction is the game Minecraft, a single or multiplayer game that has a client-server architecture to it, millions of users, a newly released version (as of last week), and a vibrant community. When I first saw the game I was put off by the seemingly crude graphics (a cube-constructed world with overlaid textures on the blocks), but I quickly got over that when I saw how it was both fun to play, sparks creativity in the way it has you gather materials and craft things in survival mode or encourages major creativity in building structures and contraptions in creative mode. I’m also impressed by the huge and vibrant community of people playing and extending the game with plug-ins (mods), custom maps, and public server worlds you can go and play in through sites like http://planetminecraft.net.

Setting up a Minecraft Server

With Minecraft you can play single player on a local machine, or you can connect to remote servers. If you are a power user or someone with some IT chops you can easily set up a server of your own for which there are dozens of simple tutorials out there. It basically involves downloading the server software, running it, disabling any intervening firewalls, and typing in an IP address on the client to the server machine.

Of course what comes next is “Dad, can my friends connect to my Minecraft server?”

So I went down that route and configured our home router to do port forwarding to allow open internet traffic to come into the port that Minecraft uses to a machine on our home network. Not too tough and again dozens of tutorials out there that will walk you through that. The scary part there is poking holes in your firewall to allow unknown (and sometimes malicious) parties into your home network and onto a machine that may have other personal information on it. You also have the fact that one of the most important factors in smooth gameplay when connecting to a server is the bandwidth of the connection. If you don’t have a screaming fast internet connection, or have bandwidth limitations on your connection, you could simply be setting up an unusable server in the first place.

Enter Windows Azure Virtual Machines

Being a Microsoft Windows Azure Insider, it naturally occurred to me that there is some infrastructure out there that is optimal for this kind of shared access – Windows Azure. Windows Azure has a lot of capabilities to it including shared host roles, storage, access control and more – what is generally referred to as PaaS – Platform as a Service. But a relatively new offering from Windows Azure is IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service – which includes virtual machine hosting.

...

..."

AHH, finally, a good reason to get going with Azure VM's!

[wait... that sounds kind of snarky... It's not meant to be. I was trying to be funny... I guess I should keep my day job... ;]

Actually the more I think about this, the more I like the idea. You can spin it down when you're done with it, you don't have to jack with your home firewalls, yada, yada... hum...